


Sunshine, Shadows, and Silence

by Deifire



Category: Sunshine - McKinley
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/pseuds/Deifire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something had changed with Mel after that night in No Town. We still didn't know how to talk about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunshine, Shadows, and Silence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pollymel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollymel/gifts).



I didn't expect things to go back to normal any time soon after that night in No Town. Those first few days back in my real life, I spent most of my free time worrying. I worried about my developing...association with a vampire, and what it might mean. I worried about SOF, and the fact that Con and I were now firmly on the Goddess of Pain's radar.

I worried about my hands, baker's hands, and what I might have done to them when I'd been forced to touch Bo to do what I did. You'd think after the vision of my grandmother and the evidence of my own eyes had assured me there was no taint of corruption, I would have been fine. But the first time I tried to knead bread dough, I shook so badly, I had to go hide in the dark supply closet and reassure myself that they were just my hands, hands and the faint gold glimmer of my light-web, before I could get back in my bakery and start making cinnamon rolls.

What I didn't expect to have to worry about was Mel.

But even after the other things had started to fade--even as I grew more comfortable in my relationship with Connor, became more adept at avoiding the SOF (both the regulars I'm pretty sure were still on my side, and the Goddess's lackeys, who I was just as certain weren't), and had gotten the reassuring-myself-my-hands-weren't-poisoned thing down to once in a while on the really bad days--my steady, solid, if slightly shady, boyfriend still topped my list of concerns.

Something had changed with Mel after that night.

I don't know that the signs were easy to spot unless you knew him.

The first was that he started drinking way more coffee than usual, and considering Mel usually drank enough for ten normal caffeine addicts, that was a skegging hell of a lot. Even Charlie started asking him if he'd decided to give up sleeping.

Which wasn't a bad question, because damned if Mel didn't look tired lately. Plus, there was the fact that he seemed to be spending an awful lot of time tinkering with motorcycles. Which, again, was only a variation on typical Mel behavior, but when the rehab project of the week became the rehab project of the day, I worried, because I wasn't sure how he was getting it done except by pulling some serious all-nighters.

I mean, he still did everything else he normally did. He still came to work. He still, at least as far as I could tell, spent the usual amount of time with his friends, both in and away from the coffee house. And he still spent time with me. We went hiking. We put in appearances at Seddon Monday movie night. We made love, if now a more hesitant, tentative, overly considerate type of love than two people who'd know each other intimately for so many years had any business making.

We still didn't talk about it.

We'd worked so long and hard at building up our comfortable wall of silence that even now that it was no longer comfortable, it was too high and solid to break.

Also, there was no way to talk about what was going on with him without getting into a lot of detail about what had been going on with me.

See, I could really tell what was wrong by the shadows. The shadows I had never told him I could see, because that would have meant explaining too much about my vampire affinity. And Connor.

The bright red, dazzling shadows that flickered in Mel's face and around the outlines of his tattoos weren't quite as calm as they had been before the night of No Town.

My mind went back to the vision I'd had back in Bo's inner sanctum. _Mel, his hands raised toward me, light leaping from his tattoos like flames. Like something powerful that had only existed beneath the skin before had been brought to the surface._

He'd done something to help us that night. I was sure of it. I wondered what it had cost him.

Speaking of tattoos, he rubbed them a lot more lately, too.

I was determined to say _something_ the day I saw him in the kitchen, rubbing at his oak tree and absentmindedly getting bits of egg and flour all over that shoulder. But I lost my courage at the last minute and wound up making plans to go out with him and his friends for a drink that night instead.

Mel was his usual charming, amiable good old boy self that night. And considerate, in that subtle way of his, carefully changing the subject back to something like ignition timing when it started to wander into the mystery what exactly went down on a certain night in No Town.

I, on the other hand, wasn't quite as together. I was so busy paying attention to Mel that somewhere along the way I'd forgotten to pay attention to how much I'd been drinking. Which it turns out was quite a lot. It may be a side effect of a schedule that involves getting up at four in the morning to make cinnamon rolls, but you can tell I'm getting close to drunk by the way I get suddenly sleepy. So I was dead on my feet by the time Mel decided to drive me home in the Wreck, and made arrangements with a friend to follow and give him a ride back to the bar.

It was only the second time I'd seen him drive a car. The whole way home, I watched the shadows play on his hands as they gripped the steering wheel and shifted gears. I don't know. Maybe too much beer also made me talkative, because as we coasted into my driveway, I finally found the nerve to ask, "Mel, is everything okay?"

"I'm fine, babe," he said, looking a little confused or possibly a little guilty. "We're here. Chuck's giving me a ride back to the Jug. See you tomorrow?"

It was avoiding the subject. He knew it and I knew it. But I only responded "Sure," let him take me into his arms and give me a long, slow kiss, and tried to convince myself everything was fine.

And it might have worked, too. Except the next morning, the Wreck was different.

I don't know how I knew before I even started it, except that I smelled the faint ozone-before-a-storm scent of Mel's magic bearing tattoos when I got behind the wheel. It was confirmed when I _did_ start driving and for the first time ever, my car had a top speed of at least seventy and a fully functioning third gear.

I wanted to say something. Badly. But when you can't get out "Hey, did you fix my car?" without it sounding less like a prelude to a thank you, and more like an accusation of I-don't-know-what-exactly, maybe it's better to keep your mouth shut.

It might have gone on like this forever if Prometheus, Charlie's industrial strength stove, hadn't chosen two days later to finally shuffle loose the mortal coil.

It had been a carthaginian hell of a day already. Liz and Mary were out with the flu, the early morning crowd was already shaping up to be larger than usual, something was going on between Mom and Kenny again that had the whole family on edge, and our least favorite regular, Mr. Cagney, had been his usual charming self to the new waitress Charlie had brought in to cover Mary's shift. And then Prometheus decided to just up and die before the breakfast shift had even properly started.

Mom, who knew how much Charlie's could afford one more major repair or replacement right now, looked slightly ill. Emmy, who had never quite settled into the job of assistant cook, looked ready to have a nervous breakdown.

Of course, somebody thought to call Mel. After all, if anybody could fix it, he could. Instead he came in, tinkered with it for a bit, then slowly shook his head.

From the look on his face, I knew that it was doomed. I expected his next move would be to break the bad news to Charlie. Instead, Mel just turned on that charm of his and shooed everybody out of the kitchen. I'm sure he realized I didn't leave, but he didn't say anything as I tried to blend quietly into the shadows and watched what he was going to do next.

What he did was lay both hands flat on top of Prometheus, gave the big black monster a look, took a deep breath, and uttered a word that wasn't one my grandmother's but sounded like it probably came from the same lexicon.

I felt power flow from him to the stove.

As the dead metal beast clanked slowly back to life, I watched the shadows around Mel's face finally settle. His shoulders relaxed, as though he'd just been relieved of a heavy burden he'd been carrying for weeks.

I watched him smile the first genuine smile I'd seen in a long time.

By the time one of the staff finally wandered back into the kitchen, Mel was calmly cooking up a big batch of bacon and eggs. He got Emmy started on the pancakes and the kitchen slowly began to settle back to normal.

Mom called him a miracle worker. Charlie promised him a raise.

I fled back to the safety of my bakery, and made cinnamon rolls. And muffins. And Orange-Date Tea Bread. And Killer Zebras. And Hell's Angel Food. And Sunshine's Eschatology. The more I baked, the less I'd have to think.

All the while, my face was flushed with shame. I had practically interrogated Con that night I'd found him in his earth place, but I still didn't know who or what my own boyfriend really was. And I didn't have the skegging courage to ask him what had just happened here.

_I'm your friend, Sunshine_. He told me once. _The rest is just noise on the line._

Did I want any more answer than that?

Finally, my shift ended.

I found Mel out in the courtyard, waiting for me and drinking coffee. I didn't say anything. Just got on the back of his bike, and let him take me back to his place. I followed him all the way up to the roof before I finally found the courage to break the silence.

"Mel," I began. He turned to look at me. "I..."

Whatever I would have said next was lost when, to my absolute horror, I burst into tears.

He gathered me into his arms, and I sobbed against his shoulder as he held me and whispered, "Sheer, Sunshine. It's okay."

"Mel, that night when I..." I stopped, began again. "You did something, didn't you? And something...woke up"

He pulled back and studied me for a while, as if considering his words. Then said, "Something like that. But it's asleep again now."

I studied the shadows on his face, outlined in the dazzling red I could never see past.

I heard the wind-through-leaves voice of my tree-self say _yessss_.

I met Mel's eyes. He nodded.

And I heard something respond with a _YESSSS_ of its own. It wasn't mine. It sounded nothing at all like the quiet voice of my tree-self. This voice roared, like the revving of some sort of powerful engine.

I should have known by Mel's affinity for machines. His element was metal. And fire. And he had more raw power than any magic-using Blaise was ever rumored to have. The tattoos were for many, many things, but one them was to specifically for the purpose of feeding off Mel's strength. Of channeling and dampening a force that never quite took to being controlled on its own.

It wasn't anything like a mind scan was supposed to feel like. It was that I suddenly knew and understood these things, as if I'd always known them, when I finally made myself really see Mel for the first time.

I saw the fourteen-year-old boy, in the ruins of somewhere he once loved--I had heard that when magic users attuned to fire first came into their power, especially if they hadn't been taught to expect it, things sometimes ended badly--the first magic user born into a family in which the gift had been dormant for so long it was no longer understood, deciding that if he was born bad, he might as well _be_ bad, and setting off on a path toward the rest of his life.

I saw a different Mel--a few years older and with a harder look in his eyes, but still improbably young--and felt the prick of the needle in my own shoulder as he received his first magic bearing tattoo. It was the oak tree. A symbol of incorruptibility and immunity to dark magic. I understood that what I was seeing was the beginnings of a different choice, one that hadn't even fully been made yet as the tree began to take shape on his shoulder, but one that would eventually lead him to the door of Charlie's coffee house.

I saw a third Mel. Mel during the wars, surrounded by a horde of ghouls, knowing that he was too late to save the friends that had gotten there first. There was still a patch of bare skin where an hourglass tattoo would someday live, a charm against running out of time.

He was filled with rage and raw power and...

_Oh gods and angels._

I hoped if my boyfriend the short order cook ever started living up to his full potential, he was going to stay firmly on our side.

And then I saw someone who was not Mel. This was a young woman kneading bread dough, her hair tied back in a scarf, wearing an improbably colorful outfit. Even from a distance she felt like light and warmth, like a calm breeze blowing through the leaves of an oak tree. She felt like someone with power, someone with the potential to do many things, and she'd chosen to follow the instinct that told her to use her energy to feed people.

It was something Mel understood very well. I felt him decide that this was definitely someone worth getting to know better.

Yes, this was Mel seeing me for the first time. And Mel had another tattoo that was a charm for seeing things clearly.

I finally fully understood what Con, and my grandmother, and even Yolande had been trying to tell me. I had power, but there was nothing evil about me. For the first time, I finally really believed it.

I also understood something else. For the past four years, I'd been the calm center of Mel's universe as much as he had been mine.

There were things at the edges of Mel's true self that I saw flickering just out of sight in the shadows--the answer to the question of whether he was just human or something more, a no longer used family name that I was sure Pat and Jesse and the other SOF regulars would have recognized, and would thus never be mentioned--but I didn't look more closely. Not because I was afraid this time, but because these things were just noise on the line.

I came back from the shadow-self, and found myself staring into my boyfriend's eyes.

"Mel," I said

"Sunshine," he replied.

I'd like to say we had a long heart-to-heart after that, where I finally told him about what had been happening to me since that day at the lake, and he finally shared a little more from his own past, and the wall of silence came down for good. But this was me, and this was Mel.

What happened was that I ran my hands down his arms, tracing his tattoos, even as he moved his down to the small of my back, and pulled me closer. When he looked like he was about to say something else, I stopped my mouth with his.

I think we both simultaneously realized that the only things between us at that moment that we needed to get off our chests were our shirts. And my bra.

The rest of our clothes followed, and I found myself being lowered to the ground, Mel's mouth tracing a line from my neck down to my scar, as I raised myself up to let him fit himself inside me.

There was nothing cautious or overly considerate about it this time. This was the energetic and, dare I say it, fiery sort of lovemaking I remembered from before, where we both took what we needed, until finally we wound up exhausted, fully spent and pleasantly sore, lacking the energy to do anything else but rest in each other's arms, enjoying the silence and soaking up the sunlight.

Bodies have their own language. A language in which Mel and I could say all that ought to be said.


End file.
